I'm in Rocket Science

At last, I have some news. Things have been quiet recently because there's not been much going on, writing wise. However, I'm going to be in the 'Rocket Science' anthology, edited by Ian Sales, and coming out from Mutation Press Books.

The story 'The Taking of IOSA-2083' wouldn't have happened without Ian's work on his 'Rocket Science News' blog. I knew about 'Rocket Science' after seeing flyers at Eastercon, but I couldn't think of a story. Months went by, and still no real ideas came. But Ian was producing charts on the 'Rocket Science News' blog showing the state of submissions, and including such aspects as the setting of the story, the type of the story, and the gender and nationality of the protagonist. I decided that a good place to start in writing a story for the anthology, would be to deliberately aim to put a new 'slice' on each pie chart, to write a story that didn't fall into any of the existing story categories.



I knew I had a head start with this, because I normally write female protagonists (and often female antagonists too), I just find them more interesting (do I do a convincing job? Who knows, but at least half the people reading know as little about what's 'convincing' as I do, and anyways most male characters in fiction are nothing like me or anyone I ever met, and everyone seems to think they're convincing.) So if I just went with my normal schtick, I'd be in the smaller slice for 'protagonist gender'. But that wasn't enough, I wanted a slice of my own, so I went for 'ungendered human' (though conventionally considered a 'she', because of their background in the 'Warring Moons Period' milieu, and because I didn't want to battle with ungendered pronouns). Okay, that's one chart dealt with, but there's still 'story location' to deal with. I really wanted to do the Kuiper belt, but the ideas didn't come. Luna, Mars, Interplanetary space, Exoplanets and some of the Moons of Jupiter had been done. The 'Warring Moons Period' would, of course, normally mean Jupiter (you knew that, right?), but as Jupiter's moons were clearly popular, that would be risking winding up in a slice with someone else, and I want one for myself. I avoided Saturn too, and went straight out to Uranus, and used its largest moon, Titania.

'Nationality' was already covered. As my protag was a neut, a person born from a jar to be a 'coffin-dodger' fighting in the wars of the Jovian system, so their nationality was going to be one of those moons. I was surprised to see that no-one else seemed to be submitting stories with non-Earthly nationalities, so I'd have a slice of my own there too.

That just left 'Story Type'. At this point 'mystery', 'rescue', 'fix problem or die', 'first contact', 'alternate history' and 'family drama' were all taken, I wanted a new slice on the pie-chart, so I went for a genre that I've long wanted to do in SF-nal form, "noir/heist". Actually, most of what I write is kinda 'noir', but there are too few good 'heist' stories in spec-fic, a genre that seems well suited to this form. (Indeed, just think for a moment how cool it would be to see a high-fantasy heist piece, not 'Muscular barbarian must battle monsters to get the maguffin' but rather 'carefully selected team of people must steal the maguffin cleverly from a castle full of magical entrapments and security', you don't often see that. And then there's steampunk...)

With this much planned out, the other elements of the story fell into place. I've long wanted to do a bunch of SF stories with 'stolen' titles that reference works outside the genre (too much in-genre reference gets incestuous). For a heist it had to be 'The taking of XXXXX'. But the taking of what? One of the things I'd really wanted to do in my 'Kuiper belt' story (for which I couldn't come up with a plot) was use a powerful heat source to turn comets into rocketships by flash-melting their ice and projecting it behind them as steam (come on, who doesn't want to do this?). Hence, the taken thing would be a comet (that's been turned into a giant icy rocketship).

Next, I looked into comet naming systems, and discovered that they look like this:

10P/Tempel

That's no good, if it's going to be 'The Taking of' then it needs to be 'The Taking of [name] [number]'. Fortunately I'm a spec-fic writer, so I can get around such problems by saying 'In 2082 the Jovian comet registry introduced its own naming system. SHAZAM! Out, out foul and inconvenient fact!' Really, you don't have to be accurate in all details, many things will have changed by the time your story is set, if a fact proves annoying you just need to find a plausible way of disposing of it. This works for people too, but don't say I told you that.

The 'Why' of the heist actually came from one of my failed submissions to 'In Situ'. All of these failed, I tried to write them during a period when other commitments were demanding too much of me to do much writing, and I tried to accelerate time using weapons-grade caffeine. This did not end well. The stories came out like something written by a wild-eyed lunatic under the influence of stimulants. As, at that point, I was a wild-eyed lunatic operating under the influence of stimulants I though they were genre-changing-works-of-extreme-brilliance. Although I have clear and distinct memories of proof-reading and spell-checking them, when the rejections came back I discovered that I'd somehow sent out a confused mish-mash full of spelling mistakes. There's a lesson to be learned here, if it looks like you can't really make a deadline, don't force it (unless you've already been paid to make it), there will always be another anthology along in a while. However, don't throw anything away, your most incoherent scribblings often have the most original ideas hidden in them. The idea I took from one of these failed stories wasn't particularly original, but it was what "The Taking of IOSA-2083" needed. One of the 'In Situ' stories featured people trying to escape from a failing colony at Uranus. This meant that the 'heist' I was dealing with wasn't going to be "Get the diamonds" it was going to be "Fly us to Cuba and no-one gets hurt."

So, down to the business of writing it. Early on a managed to crowbar a Bagpuss reference into what was shaping up to be a pretty dark story. That's when I knew that the gods were with me. This was it, this was the one they'd remember me for (there was a voice in the back of my head saying 'you've been at the Yunan Tea again, haven't you?', but I knew that was the weakness speaking). I fretted a lot over the 'hardness' of the SF, there was one piece of technology, the 'hibernation coffin', that I wasn't sure was really do-able. There's been some conflicting evidence about human hibernation, but we don't *know* that it's doable, so is it really 'Hard SF'? However, everything else...

At this point, I had a startling epiphany. It's entirely possible to write science fiction that looks pretty wild and far-fetched, and yet features nothing that we couldn't do today, or in fact when I was born! This is why much 'golden age' SF is still SF, we just didn't do those things. Moonbases, space-stations, colonies under the sea or on other worlds, I cannot see that these things are anything but do-able, but we just haven't done them. In fact, contrary to what everyone says, and what I've always believed, technological change in my lifetime has been close to zero, we've only seen incremental improvements on things that already existed (If you start talking about mobile phones, I will find you and kill you). Societal change, on the other hand, has been huge. Any reasonably science-fiction literate person lifted from 1969 to 2011 could only be hugely disappointed by what paltry progress we've made, and probably very alarmed about what we've become (on the latter point, I would not be with them, I think we're shaping up okay in many ways, but I think a person from 1969 would be appalled by much of what we hold dear. So it goes.)

Anyways, eventually it was finished. There was much that I was worried about in it, but there's a point where you've got to stop messing about with it and click 'send'.

Seven days later (Seven days?! That's *fast*, that's fast even for an editor who isn't deluged in hundreds of submissions, and that's how it should be) and after I'd already concluded from duotrope response times that I was going to get a rejection (Rocket Science accepts in 4 days on average, but rejects in 11, as Ian is committed to writing full rejection letters, a brave choice that I hope he won't regret) I got the "I'll take it" email.

I'm really pleased to get into this one. You could be pleased to, Ian is still looking for more material, both fiction and relevant non fiction, and there's still 3 weeks left for submissions.